Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 9 (EISS 9 ... - CSSP - CNRS

this paper, we propose to exploit this for an implementation of a detailed syntax-related semantic
decomposition of both constructional and lexical meaning components. As a case study we have
described a model for the dative alternation in English. Our LTAG analysis separates the lexical
meaning contribution from the contribution of the construction, taking advantage of LTAG’s
separation between unanchored elementary trees and lexical anchors. Furthermore, we have
factorized the two constructions (double object and prepositional object) into smaller fragments,
some of which are shared between the two constructions.
Our analyses have demonstrated that below the level of lexicalized elementary trees and
their semantic representations, the metagrammar formalism in LTAG allows us to identify those
fragments of syntactic structure that are the potential carriers of meaning. This is partly due to
the abstraction from surface structure that comes with LTAG’s adjunction operation and the resulting
extended domain of locality. As semantic representations we have used decompositional
frames represented as typed feature structures, which encode rich semantic information. So far,
it seems that the metagrammar descriptions of trees and frames can be rather simple in the sense
of being first order tree or feature logics without quantification and negation. The formal properties
of our framework need to be further investigated examining a larger range of semantic
phenomena. Moreover, we aim not only at theoretically modeling certain linguistic phenomena
but also at implementing corresponding grammar fragments. The tools for implementing
and testing LTAG grammars are already available, though they need to be adapted to our needs
concerning the feature logic we choose. 13
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13 We will use the metagrammar compiler XMG (https://sourcesup.cru.fr/xmg/) and the TAG parser
TuLiPA (https://sourcesup.cru.fr/tulipa/).
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